Lawrence.com

QuickView:

Good: Cool art, good ideas

Bad: Shallow, no save or sharing feature

Buy only if: You're incredibly curious

With the DS winning the new portable system battle, we keep seeing the advent of even newer, fresher ideas. Electroplankton is so far out in left field that Nintendo decided not to spend the money to put it in stores due to its predicted niche appeal. (It's available everywhere online.)

Electroplankton isn't really a game in the traditional sense. Heck, it's not even so in a radical sense. Taking a cue from several random or looping music generators, EP is just that a music generator. However, it generates very simple tunes with the cunning use of polygonal plankton reacting to certain touches or arrangements depending on which of the ten events you choose to "play."

For instance, one event has you shooting plankton into several leaves. Each leaf has a note attributed to it. You can use the stylus to arrange the leaves in different angles, so the plankton will rebound and bounce to different leaves at different times. Theoretically you maneuver the leaves and change the trajectory of the shooting plankton until you reach a fun musical creation.

One event is a plentiful network of arrows that four different speeds of plankton traverse. Each time plankton pass an arrow, it plays a specific note. You can change the direction of the arrow to change the order of notes in which the plankton play, and like the other events, you'll probably tweak it until you get a result that's pleasing to your ears.

Some events have you using the microphone to record samples that play back to a simple drum beat. One has you simply recording a sample while you filter it through different voice effects. Another event requires the spinning of five rings with the stylus to produce a different tone.

Each event in Electroplankton is overly simple, not really doing anything different from inexpensive musical loops shareware that you can get off of the internet. Sure, with EP you can use the stylus, but it's pure novelty. And the novelty wears thin quickly with the lack of depth to the software.

Surely the saving grace would be the ability to save compositions and share them wirelessly with friends. Not only can you not share your musical happenings, there is no option to save them. This is purely baffling.

The graphics bring a unique art style to the table. The effects of certain musical voyages are bright, colorful and relaxing, even though I really don't feel the DS would break a sweat to pull any of it off. The music itself doesn't vary too much, but the included tones are crystal clear and provide enough to justify itself as some sort of musical creation diversion.

Again, Electroplankton isn't a game. It's a very basic piece of musical software with an interesting art theme which Nintendo has made fairly accessible. It's just too bad there's not much there and you'll never have proof of your potential musical genius.

Graphics: B-

Sound: B

First Play: B+

Last Play: D+

Gameplay: C

Overall: 70% C-